Summoning the specters of musical forbears, and channeling the spirits of their successors, the 2008 New Music Seance Concerts featured a marathon of performances by pianist Sarah Cahill, and the dynamic violin/piano duo of Kate Stenberg and Eva-Maria Zimmermann. The concerts were held in the intimate, candle lit setting of the historic Arts & Crafts styled Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco on December 6, 2008. Prior to the third concert, which was dedicated to the music of Ruth Crawford and her contemporaries, Prof. Judith Tick of Northeastern University, gave a lecture on this pioneering American women composer. Born in 1901 Ruth Crawford had an early musical education in the form of piano lessons from her mother. In 1921 she traveled to Chicago to study at the American Conservatory of Music with the intention of returning home in a year’s time and to support herself as a piano teacher. However the allure of the big city during the 1920s proved too much and Crawford never returned home and instead became involved with a group of avant-garde composers, musicians, and spiritualists that included Dane Rudhyar, Henry Cowell, Vivian Fine, and Charles Seeger, whom she later married. Until her untimely death in 1953, Crawford continued to compose both radically modern music as well as more traditional American folk music, and remains one of the country’s most prominent women composers. For a complete description of all the pieces heard please check out the Program Guide which can be found at http://www.otherminds.org/shtml/Seance3program2.shtml

This project has been made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius.


This movie is part of the collection: Other Minds Video Archive

Producer: Other Minds
Audio/Visual: sound, color
Language: English
Keywords: Other Minds; New Music Seance; Lecture; Panel Discussion; Ruth Crawford; 20th Century Classical; New Music

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States

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